Subversion

I'm working on a Sharepoint project which has some interesting points: 

• We're constrained to use Visual Studio .NET 2003 by the client (so none of your Team System stuff)
• We have 3 developers, on three sites, plus a client developer on a fourth and fifth site

 It's a biggish project, and the thought of trying to run Visual SourceSafe under these circumstances frightened me. I've seen that thing "working" over a VPN, and it ain't pretty.  What to do?

Well, if you subscribe to Eric Raymond's taxonomy, we're a "cathedral" sort of company. Microsoft gold partner, well-defined methodology, coding standards and all that. But clearly the working environment smacks somewhat of the "bazaar" (please: no jokes about it being "bizarre" - they are far too close to the bone), and I figured at the outset that it was time to take a serious look at incorporating at least some "bazaar" techniques into our "cathedral" framework. Open-source projects successfully manage hundreds of developers, on hundreds of sites: how do they do it? By subversion (well, perhaps also by CVS and others, but this article is about subversion). I don't mean that they sneakily and deviously implement their software, I mean that they use subversion as a source code/version control system.